What you get with Pierre-Emerick Emiliano Aubameyang is a show. Goals. Fast cars. Fancy dress. Olympic sprinter speed. Somersaults. Borussia Dortmund’s massive Sudtribune (Yellow Wall) famously doesn’t need much to spark its ferocious loyalty and noise from their massive support.

However, with the first Gabon footballer ever to play in the Bundesliga, they must think they have won the transfer market lottery.

Losing Polish goal-scoring star Robert Lewandowski to bitter enemies Bayern Munich was not just a haemorrhage of goals, but a terrible slight to prestige and self-confidence. Manager Jurgen Klopp leaving was also always going to mean kissing auf wiedersehen to a barrelload of personality, colour and humour.

Prolific Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has scored 23 goals in 21 for Borussia Dortmund this season

It would be too much to say that one man, even a super hero, speed of-light goal machine, can replace them both. But the sound and sight of tumbleweed blowing through the club if Aubameyang was not there to compensate would be depressing indeed. Perhaps ‘Auba’ — as he is now known in Westphalia — arrived with the reputation of being ‘a bit flash’.

This is a nose-to-the-grindstone, blue-collar area where people work hard and where Borussia Dortmund and its values still bear the kind of connection which once existed between clubs and their workingclass fans in industrial Britain. Famously, when playing in France at St Etienne, he wore lime green boots encrusted with some 4,000 Swarovski crystals while warming up for a match against Lyon.

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Less recorded is the fact that he was in the middle of an eight-game goal drought or that St Etienne lost that derby at home to their bitter rivals. Not cool. With his penchant for fast cars, all of which cost six figures, and his upper-class nomenclature (Pierre-Emerick Emiliano), it is fair to say there was a hint of scepticism surrounding Aubameyang when he landed in Dortmund.

However, any doubt lasted the blink of an eye, given that the French-born, Milan-trained, Gabon international came on to give a goalassist in the 4-2 German Supercup win over Bayern Munich in his first Dortmund match, then immediately hit a hat-trick on his Bundesliga debut against Augsburg, which was a good way to win over the sceptics. What about those celebrations?

Their roots are in the friendship ‘Auba’ enjoys with goalkeeper Jeremie Janot at St Etienne. Janot is even more obsessed with comic-book superheroes than the striker and famously played in a Spiderman kit for Les Verts against Istres (clean sheet and a 2-0 win). ‘Anything Janot can do, I can do better,’ was Aubameyang’s theme when Dortmund beat Bayern Munich in the Supercup for the second consecutive year and the striker made one goal and scored the other.

Special players like the big occasion, so ‘Auba’ wasn’t finished there. Last season, he and Marco Reus donned Batman and Robin outfits to celebrate Dortmund winning 3-0 in the hard-fought derby against Schalke. And February’s celebration was repeated earlier this month when ‘Auba’ slotted home the winner in a 3-2 victory over the same side. He took a booking for stripping off his Dortmund top to reveal a T-shirt with ‘Boom’ in Batman script, the Caped Crusader logo and the words ‘Do You Remember?’

When he arrived at Dortmund, the Gabon international was famous for something other than his ‘flash’ nature — his speed! While training with AC Milan as a youth (what a mistake the Italian club made in trading him away before he reached maturity), he clocked 3.7 seconds over a 30-metre sprint. Much was made of the fact that when sprint legend Usain Bolt set his 2009 100m record in Berlin, he was 8/100ths of a second slower over the same distance.

The Gabon international is famous for his ‘flash’ nature and his speed

‘Maybe we should get a race organised between us,’ suggested Aubameyang. Despite all this and the Ferrari 458 with his initials emblazoned on it, the Lamborghini or the Aston Martin with his squad number printed on the tyres, he wants to be taken seriously as a player. He can first point to the change in his goal efficiency since moving to a harder physically-testing league just over two years ago. Aubameyang hit 41 in 120 Ligue 1 matches, sometimes in front of just 4,000-5,000 spectators when he was with Monaco.

Since moving to Dortmund, notwithstanding the greater pressure, the more competitive nature of the championship, he has scored more goals (44) in only 78 Bundesliga games. This season, his overall total — 23 in 21 outings in league, cup and European games — makes him one of the most prolific strikers anywhere.

Neymar has 14 in 16, Luis Suarez 16 in 18, Ronaldo 15 in 17 and Lewandowski 20 in 20. ‘I’m loose, happy and full of jokes around the club but I work hard and I’m a serious professional,’ the teetotaller declared. ‘It’s only the media who seem to think that because I like flash clothes and fast cars I might not be intense about working and winning. Our fans know what I’m like.’ Now comes one of those little hurdles which can define a player’s progress.

Dortmund have hit a speed bump. Beaten at Hamburg last week (‘Auba’ scored), they added the first back-to-back loss due to their Europa League defeat at Russian club Krasnodar. On the return journey home, their plane was diverted around Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula before being required to land in Paderborn, 55 miles from Dortmund, because of a night flight ban at their home airport. They got to bed at 4am. Winning their home game against Stuttgart today is vital to restore order, pride and stay in contact with Bayern Munich in the league. A job for ‘Auba’.